Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Copied from reddit...

As it stands, the attacker has nothing to lose aside from his spaceships. This allows two situations to happen.

1.The attacker can just hurl tons and tons of cheap ships at the defender. The Defender eventually gets sick of fighting over the system, and has nothing to gain from fighting the attacker again.

2.Groups like PL can bring a 2000 man super blob to farm fights to the detriment of the defender, only committing to the timer if the defender tries to blueball. In this scenario, PL loses only a couple ships while the defender can loose up to 50 or 100 ships.

But what if failed timers added on to a systems defense? It rewards players for being good at PVP and gives the defender another reason to show up. This is what happens now in these two scenarios

1.Each time the attacker loses, the next attack will be harder. Eventually the attacker would be at such a disadvantage, they have no choice but to attack another system or retreat.

2.This PL-like group would need to put a limit on how much farming they do, as if they continue abandoning timers it will lead to a cancer grind. This kind of stops the defender from getting endlessly holocausted.

I can see this open to exploitation though, such as creating a 1 man alliance and purposely failing timers. This can be countered by making this defensive debuff apply each alliance separately. So if Alliance A loses two timers against alliance B, they would have a tougher time capturing it compared to Alliance C. This also runs into some problems, as coalitions pretty much guarantee you get a mixed bag of alliances. I don't know how to counter this though...

So what do you guys think?

It'd be instantly metagamed.

Example:

The Imperium alliances start attacking each other, and not showing up to the generated timers. The defending alliances now get a bonus because of the fake-attack from their allies.

This makes it harder for real attackers to attack.


This also works for alt-alliances, and mercenaries. A sov-holding body can organise when to harden their systems to minimise the chance that someome(read:Reavers) will show up and actually flip a system.

A counterargument to the metagaming proposed: since timers can be exploited by anyone, not just the original attacking alliance, generating them via alt-alliances actually puts your space at risk of capture from third parties.

Alternatively, making the debuff unique to each pair of alliances, like a sort of standings system, would alleviate the problem.

Yeah that's actually a good point.

You do not need a coalition-wide chat. Everything important gets pinged out on Jabber.